Since the release of the single “Gunshowers” 4 months ago, I was looking forward to the complete album of BADBADNOTGOOD feat. Ghostface Killah – “Sour Soul”. For me it will be the Yasiin Gaye of 2015.
Wu Tang’s Ghostface Killah teamed up with the Canadian instrumental Jazzband BADBADNOTGOOD (who have a great selection of tracks on Soundcloud).

Enjoy! My favorite track is “Food”. I dig these beats and the rhythm.

]]>http://bettertastethansorry.com/2015/02/good-not-bad/feed/0http://bettertastethansorry.com/2015/02/good-not-bad/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=good-not-badLoco’lhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BetterTasteThanSorry/~3/bEk8JCUG32w/
http://bettertastethansorry.com/2015/02/locol/#commentsSat, 07 Feb 2015 09:02:35 +0000http://bettertastethansorry.com/?p=8240[...]]]>
There are two guys in L.A. right now, who are trying to revolutionize the food industry: Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson. Roy Choi is a chef and the mastermind behind a collection of outstanding restaurants and food trucks in L.A. (Kogi BBQ, 3 Worlds Café, Alibi Room, Sunny Spot, A-Frame and Chego). I wrote about Roy Choi before, he gave me this amazing Korean BBQ recipe.

Daniel Patterson – also chef, opened restaurants all along the West Coast: Coi and Il Cane Rosso in SF, Plum and Haven in Oakland and is contributor to New York Times Magazine, Food & Wine Magazine, and San Francisco Magazine.

Both influenced the culinary landscape of California and the West Coast a lot. And now they will do it again, with Loco’l.

At the international food event, MAD – organized by René Redzepi, Alex Atala and David Chang, in Copenhagen last year, Roy and Daniel presented their idea of a Loco’l: “a fast food restaurant using real ingredients.”

Loco’l is a team of innovative chefs.Loco’l is locally sourced.Loco’l is using quality ingredients.
Loco’l is providing fair wages.
Loco’l is leveraging state of the art technology.Loco’l is community based.
Loco’l is crazy.

With the help of their knowledge, their experience, their connections to the best chefs in the world and with a lot of science and with the help of YOU, they want to make loco’l reality.

They started a campaign on IndieGoGO, which I already supported. I could’t spend $5,000 to hang out with Roy Choi in L.A. to eat tacos and drink beer (although I really really wanted to), BUT I gave what I can, because I want to see them succeed.

This year we started the second round of Third Wave Wichteln. André, Tho and me have been in constant exchange over the whole year to prepare this year’s coffee exchange. The first round was impressive and made us really happy. Although it has been quite rudimentary, it was a huge success and many people were really happy about it. Many but not all – I’ll explain this point later.

Several times we thought about repeating it earlier than Christmas. But finally we decided to only do it once a year. It should be something special and actually it is a hell of a lot of work. And this post is exactly about it. It’s not about receiving any pity. But about explaining some things and sharing my experiences.

Basically, I will tell you exactly how we realized the Wichteln. You might think we are crazy and any person can copy it but the person should better think twice before copying the idea, you still have a lot work to do.

Changes to 2013

At first I want to give you an overview about what we changed compared to last year. At first we set up a new website. Last year we “just” had the blog, a tumblr. It fulfilled its purpose but the limits for “designing” and “customizing” were to big, so we started the website.
The other thing is that we learned a lot from last year. Last time, we spent an entire weekend to mix the participants by hand and sending 360 emails with the addresses BY HAND. Honestly, I also think that we mixed up a lot and we made some mistakes. So, this year we wanted to automate the raffle as well as sending the e-mails. But this was not as easy as we thought.

Setup

The Website

So, what is the setup? As mentioned above we have the main information source – the website. Its purpose is to explain what Third Wave Wichteln is about and how it works. And it should look a little more serious or even “professional”. We handle personal data, so it should not look too fishy. I guess we achieved that. We bought the URLs thirdwavewichteln.com and thirdwavewichteln.de. I still had some web space – so it was easy to set up the site. WordPress is still one of the best CMS and we all knew how to handle it, so we installed it. I had a rough idea how I wanted the website to look like. Mostly a single page with all information, just some separate pages for special issues.

I sat down and scribbled some ideas. Then I bought a theme, which would make it possible to realize my ideas without actually coding and customizing too much. Newave by clapat was a perfect choice. And the support by envato was excellent. I tried as much as I can to do by myself. I know basics in HTML and CSS but I reached my limits pretty soon. So, I asked the brilliant Martin for help and once again he did an amazing job. Most ideas were thrown over and we made the best of the situation we ran into. I guess professionals call it “agile development”. I am really happy with the result.

As I mentioned in the beginning, many people were happy with the Wichteln experience last year, but not all. That was because many people never received their coffee. We found out that some post and parcel services made problems as well as some customs. So this year we pointed out to use a customs sticker, to show that the content of the package is not too expensive and nothing illegal.

Google Apps

Last year we used the Google Apps (Google Docs) and Google Drive for the form and saving the contributions. Already last year I wasn’t too sure about using Google. As mentioned above, we handle personal data (names, addresses, email-addresses, etc.) and I really tried to find alternatives. But there weren’t. There aren’t any. Nothing that is as stable and easy as Google. And I must say Google is doing some pretty amazing work. You will see later why.

So, the form where people enrolled was a Google form, and the data that is collected automatically runs into a Google Spreadsheet. Then we split up the Spreadsheet into different smaller Spreadsheets: one international and several national ones.

Excel

Google Spreadsheets are amazing but they are not as advanced as Excel. We wanted to do the raffle automatically but it was tricky. We wanted:
a) that international people don’t send to or receive coffee from the same country like their residence.
b) that international people should not receive coffee from the same country where they are shipping to. (that was not always possible because way more US americans and Germans participated)
c) that national participants should not send to or receive coffee from the same city where they are from.
d) that national participants should not receive coffee from the cities where they are shipping to.

Tricky, but my good friend Alex did some crazy algorithms like =WENN($A$1=”wahr”;ZUFALLSZAHL();ZUFALLSZAHL()+0,2) or =WENN(National!$A2=””;””;_xlfn.R($C2;$C$2:$C$500)) – So, after a few trials and errors Alex somehow managed it that a) b) c) and d) was fulfilled. So we exported all Google Spreadsheets to Excel, used the algorithms and imported the results back to Google.

Google Scripts

Sending the emails. A few weeks ago, I googled “Sending personalized emails with Google Docs and Google Mail.” I’ve found some results, so I thought it would work right away. I should have looked more closely because there are some major restrictions. Finally, I bought a script from a developer and professional blogger in India, Amit Argawal. This script, Merge Mail, connects your Google Docs (or Google Drive) with your Google Mail and lets you send form letters with personalized input. Because every single email of the 1580 needed to have a personalized address within.

Google Mail only allows to send 100 e-mails per day, at least automated e-mails via scripts. So, 1580 participants divided by 100 would make 16 days. In order to speed up the thing, I purchased a second script for a second Google account. Now everyone should get his/her e-mail until the end of the week (but to make sure we say: December 15th)

I screwed up Merge Mail two times. One time I somehow messed up the script itself, so the first 100 participants in the list received their e-mails three times. And the second time I misspelled the personalized fields, so the content couldn’t get drawn from the Google Spreadsheet.

Keep People Updated

So far it has been a good amount of work, time and money we spent into the project. But here comes the fun part. It’s actually a part that many community managers will agree on. And I don’t envy community managers for their work. You actually deal with people. And people are sometimes irrational. At first they are not attentional or at least sometimes not attentional enough. You could write 1500 times how things work and describe it as detailed as possible, but there are still many people which will ask you how things work. And one main reason is because they are lazy.

At first we made one mistake and promised that we would send all emails until December 8th. But the amount of people and the limitations of Google Mail made us expand the e-mail sending until December 15th. We tried to communicate it as much as possible. We put it into the header of the website, we wrote some more information on to the “shipping information” page. And most importantly, we wrote it into the Facebook group. But there the real magic happens. One example: One person gets anxious alarming that he/she did not receive his/her e-mail yet. At first, before waiting for an answer, three other people get anxious and comment “me neither”. You calm down, take your time and comment that there were some problems and delays, so the e-mails will arrive until December 15th. 1 minute later another person comments on the same post that he/she also has not received an e-mail yet. That really is exhausting. But that is not enough. After 5 mins another person writes a post into the group and asks why he/she didn’t receive an e-mail yet. Like I said “too lazy”, people don’t invest 20 seconds to read either one comment or another post to get their questions answered.

Don’t get me wrong, I am really not complaining here. I am just overwhelmed and surprised how people behave. And sometimes I am afraid that people participated because they just read somewhere that this is a cool idea but have no idea what this project is about or how it works. It scares me that packages won’t arrive and people won’t receive their coffee because others are just too inattentive or too lazy. (And I didn’t even mention those people who can’t even fill out a form with 6 different input fields. They forget street names, just write in their first names, and put in their country twice without mentioning their city…)

But…

Here is the big “but” (not big butt). But all this is really worth it. Spending hours and days on setting up the whole thing. Spending money on servers, URLs, themes, scripts, pro accounts, etc. Spending even more time on answering requests, solving problems, answering unnecessary questions, etc. THAT IS ALL WORTH IT, when you read the Facebook posts, tweets, see the Instagram photos that are tagged with #thirdwavewichteln. People all over the world are curious, excited, happy about something you created. That’s actually really nice.
And of course it takes some effort making it possible for 1580 (!!!) people from 52 countries (!!!) to exchange coffee with each other. And at the same time I learn about CSS, HTML, Google Apps, Scripts, Excel, etc. Totally worth it.

And it would not be possible without people like Martin, Alex and Amit. The whole project would not even exist and would not be that successfull without Andre and Tho. Thank you all!

Yesterday was Sunday. And Sunday is food day. Basically everyday is food day but Sundays are special. In Germany you would have something special like a roast or a big bird. Stuff that takes too long for a week/work day. Like a roulade. Wikipedia defines a roulade as “a slice of meat rolled around a filling”. This Sunday I made roulades – beef roulades.

I went to Ludwig, my butcher of trust, and bought two beef roulades, cut from the flank. These two pieces of meat were quite big which is good for the filling, it makes the whole thing easier.

At first I spread out the roulades, seasoned them with plenty salt and pepper. Then I spread some spicy mustard (Düsseldorfer Löwensenf) on the roulades. I cut some onions and fried some fresh bacon (also from the butcher – which is 1000 times better than pre-packed bacon from the supermarket). I topped one side of the roulades with the bacon and onions, rolled everything up and fixed it with some metal skewers.

I heated up a mixture of oil and butter in the Invita stewpot and fried the roulade until golden brown. I added the rest of the onion and waited until they were softened. I used some soy sauce to deglaze the roulades. Then I only added some beef stock and let it simmer for several hours (3-5).

For the finish I took out the roulades, brought the sauce to the boil and added some white roux and a little cream. Traditionally I served mashed potatoes and some apple sauce with the roulades.

It’s almost tradition to write about Hello Piedpiper’s Tours. At least last year I wrote about it, so shall it be this year. Not only because Fabio aka Hello Piedpiper is one of my favorite musicians, he is also a friend. This year he is touring through a lot of cities. In some cities he is touring with Brthr or The Lake Poets, also worth seeing/hearing.

If your city is on the list (or at least close by), stop by, listen to his music, buy his album and be happy.

Today I finally received the Vamp. The Vamp is a bluetooth sound receiver which you can connect to a conventional speaker just via speaker wire. The amazing thing is that it doesn’t need any additional amplifier or electricity.

The Vamp runs with battery and you can charge it via USB (cable enclosed). You can connect the Vamp with your preferred sound source (phone, tablet, mp3 player, laptop, etc.) via bluetooth or with the accompanying 3.5 audio wire.

Here is a video that shows the simplicity and the volume:

The setup is super easy. I turned the Vamp on, connected it via bluetooth to my iPad, connected the Vamp via a speaker wire to my speaker. Then I played some Occupanther (thanks for the recommendation Flo!) via Spotify. My jaw dropped as soon as I turned up the volume. It gets really loud and the sound is really ok for a mono speaker system that is not even the size of a tennis ball. I didn’t test the life of the battery yet.

I am overwhelmed by the simplicity and the outcome. Especially for £35. And you can basically hook it up to any kind of speaker.

This morning I brewed another cup of coffee. The sun was shining through the window onto the white kitchen counter and onto my coffee equipment. Today I was using my Chemex. And then I just realized how much I love the whole thing about making coffee.

If you think about it, it’s quite simple. Two ingredients: coffee beans and water – but at the same time it can get really complex with these two things. Without even taking the brewing into consideration, there are so many different aspects that play a role and have it’s own affect on your cup of coffee. The origin, soil, roast, storage, shipping of the coffee bean. The quality of water: pH-value, minerals, hardness (which is affected by the minerals…). I don’t want to explain all aspects. I am sure I can’t even if I want to. It’s science. Then there is the brewing; temperature of the water, the coarse adjustment of your grinding, the filters, the time of brewing, the pressure of the brewing, … Again many aspects that have an affect of your cup of coffee.

But nonetheless, if you just take these two ingredients and combine them in your preferred way, you can create something delicious and at the same time something really beautiful. It’s actually hard to mess up, but at the same time hard to perfect.

Brewing a cup of coffee is craft. It is basically the craft of cooking in a concentrated form. All in all it takes 3 to 10 minutes to create a cup of coffee by hand. Measuring the amount beans, heating the water, grinding the beans by hand, measuring the water temperature, taking the time, measuring the amount of water… waiting the 45 seconds of blooming before you add more water… It is a very peaceful routine. You can’t do it in a hurry, it takes its time.

And then you sit down and enjoy what you just created with your hands…

]]>http://bettertastethansorry.com/2014/10/the-aesthetics-of-coffee-making/feed/2http://bettertastethansorry.com/2014/10/the-aesthetics-of-coffee-making/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-aesthetics-of-coffee-makingLife & Thymehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BetterTasteThanSorry/~3/0UJBaIeX6vg/
http://bettertastethansorry.com/2014/09/life-thyme/#commentsTue, 23 Sep 2014 15:56:32 +0000http://bettertastethansorry.com/?p=8059[...]]]> My by far most favorite resource for culinaries on the Internet, Life & Thyme, is starting a Kickstarter campaign for a printed magazine. And you should all contribute.

I have to thank Antonio Diaz. He created something that I am addicted to and can’t get enough of. His project Life & Thyme is truly inspiring. Every time I look at their website I spend hours reading or watching films about producers, restaurants, foodies, coffee places and much more. Every story is presented in a highly creative way. Let it be photos, videos, interviews or just plain texts. One of my favorite stories is: Welcome Home, The Tale of St. Balmain. If I ever would open a restaurant, it would be exactly like this. Kane Keatinge just gets it. And Jaime Valdovino tells his story in a beautiful way.

This is just one example, there are many more. And I am looking forward to hold the magazine in my hands to browse through these stories.

So, go to Kickstarter and support Antonio and his team, I want that magazine!

A few weeks ago I had the urge to “get outside”. So, I planned a little camping trip on my own. I used to go camping quite often, usually with friends. Most of the times we would go to the Dutch beaches for some extensive “bro time“. All we basically did was drinking beer, BBQ and playing boccia along the Dutch beaches. Another time a friend and I did a road trip through Germany, Denmark and a tiny bit of Sweden. When we arrived on the north-eastern German island Rügen, we stayed at a nature campsite. Since wild camping is not allowed in Germany, it was the closest thing you can get to nature. I liked it.

This time Google helped me to find a nature campsite right between a forest and the water. It was a 2 hour car drive from Düsseldorf. One Friday afternoon, I took a rental car, packed my Heimplanet Cave and some other stuff and just took off. It was great. When I arrived, I set up my tent and explored the campsite. It was not that big but since the weather was not supposed to be the best, it was just me and 3 couples who spent the weekend at the Weser.

Then it was time to go on a hunt for food. The campsite owner suggested a little farmer’s shop in the next village. The place was a perfect idyl. When I arrived at the patio, chickens were running away from the car. The place was magical: animals everywhere, a creek was running through the farm, a water mill was running and as soon as I entered the shop, I knew I was at the right place. Everything they sold was produced at this farm in traditional manner (without any additives): the bread, the butter, the eggs, the vegetables, the ham, sausages, some schnaps… I got some bread, sausages, vegetables and butter for some bbq at night and some ham and eggs for the breakfast. As I anticipated it was impossible to taste bad.

Back at the campsite I took a swim in the Weser, started the fire, had some sausages, and spent hours next to the camp fire I started within the grill.

And over the weekend, I took some photos with my analog camera. It was fun. But back home, getting the pictures from the film was a pain in the ass. I just wanted the digital photos, but it was impossible, I had to get prints as well.

In the future I will repeat camping trips more often, maybe on a regular basis. It is great to spend some time on your own, without any particular plans.

Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic from the New Yorker, started something really cool. For weeks he tweeted songs with a picture of the record cover and the hashtag #perfectrecordings. People were wondering what this was about. Then he created collections of these tweets (the first time I realized collections on twitter). The result was a list of 5 amazing playlists with each 40 songs, totally mixed. From Run DMC and the Pet Shop Boys over Motörhead to Fiona Apple. These playlists are now also on Spotify.

Here is a short statement of Sasha from the Guardian, where he also tells anecdotes to a bunch of songs:

“There’s a play between the personal and the general here,” he says. “There were a few rules [to making my selection]. It had to be something that I played a lot and was a part of my life. Ideally it was a record that I got when it came out, and I saw its impact. Also, it has to be a song that is always better than your memory of the song. It’s all very idiosyncratic.” (via theguardian.com)

Now people are tweeting their #perfectrecordings and create playlists on Spotify and share the love for music. (You could also imagine that this whole thing was a brilliant marketing campaign from Spotify, but I couldn’t find anything about it.)

Love Is A Mixtape

The idea directly reminded me of the book I just read: Love Is A Mixtape by Rob Sheffield, another American music journalist. The book is basically divided in different chapters and every chapter is about one mixtape and its meaning to Rob Sheffield. A very personal and emotional – sometimes sad, sometimes funny – book. The mixtapes are sometimes also quite “mixed”. I created a few playlists on Spotify for the first chapters. You need to search for “Rob Sheffield” and you will find the playlists/mixtapes.

Example:

If you are a music lover, you need to read this book. And now you can enjoy the corresponding mixtapes on Spotify to get an idea what Rob Sheffield is writing about.

Fine Tunes

I created a little playlist myself a few weeks ago (also very well mixed). I could also tag it with #perfectrecordings or even write a book chapter about these songs because they have a special meaning to me. Maybe you enjoy it:

It feels good to have mixtapes back in my life, now they are just digital but the process to select music and combining is still the same.